


Morning the Dawn

by DustySoul



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Asexuality, Bedside Vigils, Cuddling & Snuggling, Disability, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, Literal Sleeping Together, Other, Platonic Romance, Post-Episode: s02e04 Face My Enemy, Pre-Slash, Sharing a Bed, Sleeping Together, can be read as, disability themes, s02e04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 18:38:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2517773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DustySoul/pseuds/DustySoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The alien ... writing, or whatever it is, keeps Coulson up at night. Coulson's insistence that May be the one to take him out if he's compromised keeps May up as well.</p><p>In their own world after lights out they talk, finding a new equilibrium.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morning the Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for conversations like the one Coulson and May have at the end of episode 4 season 2 "Face My Enemy". In fact this whole thing is basically the fall out of that scene.
> 
> Further notes about why I tagged things the way I did at the end.
> 
> Not beta-ed. You can point out spelling errors in the comments or at my tumblr: dusty-soul

Coulson opens his eyes. His room is dark. Splotches of color swirl around the unfocused room shaping and reshaping themselves into the strange alien writing. He lets out a shaky exhale, not aware he’d been holding his breath. 

The clock on his nightstand reads 1:37 in a dull red glow. He focuses on the ceiling, can barely make out the texture of it. He breathes out again, closes his eyes, and starts counting backward from 100. He loses count at seventy-something but still isn’t a sleep. So he starts over. At eighty-three  the counting switches from English into the sprawling lines and dots that feel like they’re eating into his brain. He opens his eyes again. Waits for the writing to fade out of his vision. 1:54.

 

He’s almost asleep at 45, having to concentrate on the count, feeling his senses dulling. His body and the alien writing feel far away.

His bed dips. It’s a struggle to open his eyes. Even harder to focus on the person sitting at the edge of his bed, her outline barely distinguishable from the dark room.

“May?” His voice is raspy with lack of sleep and he’s barely able to talk above a whisper.

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

This again. He sighs, “May, I need you to do what’s right. I trust you-”

“I’m not going to shoot you.” She turns to face him, steal in her voice. “Coulson, I’m not going to shoot you. I can’t shoot you.”

"May.” He reaches out to her, sluggish and fumbling in the dark.

She pulls back, leaves the room like a ghost.

Coulson expects sleep to be impossible after that. It’s not. He doesn’t even have to run through the countdown. He just stares at the door until exhaustion pulls him under. 

\--

Three, mostly sleepless, nights later she’s back. Coulson doesn’t startle when May climbs up on the foot of his bed. She can be almost as silent as Natasha when she wants. A decade around the Russian super spy was enough to completely stifle his tells.

“We don’t know if you’ll end up like Garrett.” She reminds him. “You’re a completely different person than him. Hardly the world domination type.”

He lets out a breath of air which might be a laugh, can feel his muscles loosen. “May.”

“I won’t. There has to be another way.”

“May. I want there to be, but we both know that you have to prepare for all possible circumstances. And in the event that I end up like Garrett… I won’t be me. I won’t be myself and I need someone to put me down. You’re the only one who can do it. You’ve taken out rabid dogs before.”

The blurry outline that is Melinda May puts her head in her hands.

“May, I’m living off borrowed time. I’ve been different. Ever since they brought me back, I’ve been changing.”

“May?”

“May, this isn’t like you.”

“May?”

The shadow at the end of his bed disappears. 

\--

She comes back the next night and he knows he didn't hallucinate her.

This time Coulson speaks first, sitting up in bed, waiting for her. “I want you to be the director of SHIELD.”

She stops, standing against the far wall.

“If… If I’m compromised, May, I want you to take over.”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

“Ago have… you decided that.”

“Maybe a month. It was my initial response when I found out, and upon proper reflection I don’t think anyone else would be remotely suitable for the position.”

He can see her nodding, her stiff gate as she leaves the room.

\--

She doesn’t sneak into his room for two weeks and Coulson knows she’s been rising early to spend an extra hour practicing her Tai Chi. Coulson can’t quite tell, it’s mostly a guess, the rest of the puzzle a mostly discernable picture around the missing piece, but she seems tenser than usual, more short with Skye, fewer one liners rolling off her tongue.

He lets go. She documents it.

And in the far away place the writing takes him he can feel her all around him. Can sense her tention like it’s his own. The physical space between them feels like it’s filled with light years. Like it’s the vacuum of space and he can’t quite figure out this orbit again. It's so cold.

\--

It’s a week after his last incident that she next slips into his room. Back from a simple recruitment op that went well. 

She stares at him in the red glow of the clock. For a long while. He can’t read her face. Can’t even see it.

“I’ll do it.” She whispers, “But only if I absolutely have to. Only if you're in danger of hurting the others.”  then stands, slowly, and turns to leave. 

It’s still not what he wants to hear. But maybe he’s being selfish, trying to die before he has the chance to turn into a monster.“May, stay.”

She sits, a heavy sigh whooshing out of her, her body thumping into the mattress. A harmony of desperation. And maybe she’s being selfish. Trying to save him. Trying to save herself.

He falls asleep with her there. Effortless. When he wakes, it’s to the buzzing of the alarm he hasn’t actually heard in months. 

\--

“Coulson?”

“What is it Skye?”

“I…” She looks worried, biting her lip in such an obvious tell. May should have trained her out of it. “I’m worried about Agent May.”

“Why’s that?” He asks, honestly baffled. But Skye probably can’t read him anyway.

“She’s been… You know, she hardly says six sentences to me throughout the day. I mean, that’s her, that my SO, that’s May. But… lately.” Shy shrugs, stops abusing her lips, eyes going a little unfocused, “She’s just been talking even less. Less…”

“Less what?”

“It’s stupid. Just, less praising. Of. My work. I’m just… is she alright?”

Coulson hums. “I’ll look into it.”

\--

He waits a few days. When May doesn’t sneak into his room, he slips into hers.

May’s already sitting up, back braced against the wall. Coulson guess that she heard him before he even fiddled with the lock.

“Skye’s worried about you.” He doesn’t sit on her bed, hovers in front of the closed door instead.

After a drawn out silence where he can’t feel May’s eyes scrutinizing him through the dark, she says, “I’m not so easy to read. What was the tell?”

“You’ve been talking less, apparently. Skye, she craves your attention. So when you stopped complimenting her on her form, she worried. No one else noticed.” _I didn't notice_. 

Another pause “She’s a good kid.” 

“You take good care of her.”

She hums. Coulson dares to come closer, sit at her desk. “What is it?” He asks, “What’s wrong?”

She draws in a steady breath and Coulson knows she’s letting him see her tells. “I might have to shoot you. I might have to watch your descent into madness. I know, It, it was my original assignment.”

“May, you’ve seen and done worse things…”

“Doesn’t make it easy.”

And he can hear the strain in her voice, tries to really look at her. See her through the darkness.

After a time of seeing her, of May letting him look, he whispers, “Goodnight.” And leaves.

\--

When he falls asleep it’s past 3:00 and when he wakes up it’s almost refreshing. There’s a warm spot in the bed next to him and the sheets still bear the imprint from the form curled around him.

\-- 

They’ll work it out.

\--

“I don’t like this new May.” Skye confides to Hunter.

“Oh yeah? Why not.” Hunter leers.

“She hardly speaks. Has gone all icy.” 

“You’ll have to explain what so ‘new’ then, about May.”

Skye hits him with her tablet.

\-- 

They’ll work it out.

\--

May slips into his bed right when he’s on the verge of sleep.

He drags himself into awareness. “It’ll be hard. If you have to- have to shoot me.”

“Shhh.”

“May, May, it’ll be hard. I …”

 

“What is it?” She asks when she can tell he won’t go on. 

“It’ll be hard.”

“Are you just now realizing?” A thread of irritation runs through her words.

“Yes. I mean, no... I didn’t just realize what I’ve been asking you to do. I’ve known that, for a long time, what it might come to. I did, however, just realized that I’m in love with you.”

He can feel a wave of tension roll through her. Can tell she’s willing herself to relax as her body betrays her. “When you asked me, did you know how I felt?”

“I wasn’t sure. And besides, I thought if you did, you’d say something.”

She lets out a huff of air and mulls over her words. “It was too important. I couldn’t risk it.”

_That you wouldn’t feel the same way._

_That it would damage our relationship._

_That it would interfere with our judgement._

_That we would make ourselves vulnerable._

“Nothing has to change, if you don’t want it to.”

“Let me sleep on it.”

Coulson lets out a tired sigh of his own.

He wakes, five minutes before the alarm, and there’s another body pressed up against his, breathing deeply into his chest.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I could write a paper about my personal head cannons for Melinda May's sexuality. In fact I think eventually I will. The short version is that I see her as asexual. Not sex repulsed or having a particularly notable libido. I think, to her, sex is just another itch to scratch or a way to take care of or connect with another person. Mostly it's a tool. Occasionally it's something she does for fun or to let off steam.
> 
> (I image Ward had a hell of a time seducing her because she just wasn't interested. When he worked out her maternal nature he then framed having sex with her as something he needed for emotional stability and fulfillment and she consented because it allowed her to take care of him so she got something out of it. The reason why she was so pissed at the end of season 1 was that he'd lied to her about what their sex was. It wasn't her caring for him, but him manipulating her.)
> 
> \--
> 
> Feel free to message or follow me on tumblr at dusty-soul.tumblr.com
> 
> So anyway, I don't think the relationship May and Coulson would establish after this would be a sexual one, rather a romantic one that's mostly not different from what they have in the start, it's just that they both acknowledge their feelings and do what they always did, just with the undertones of love and care being fully realized.
> 
> However this could also totally be read as pre-slash. It's completely up to interoperation (I think). Which is why they are both there.
> 
> ALSO  
> Tagging this in general was super hard because there are quite a few tags up there that the story kind of fits but also kind of not really. Hurt / Comfort and Snuggling & Cuddling for example.


End file.
